terrible gale, on the 14th of March, their rudder broke in two, so that they could no longer keep the ship's head to the wind; and if the gale had not speedily moderated, they must inevitably have perished. When the voyage was near a conclusion, and they were congratulating themselves on the end of their troubles, the ship was found to be on fire, and the flames were extinguished with great difficulty. They reached Portsmouth on the 26th of March, and on the 2d of April, the mean noon by the watch was found to be at 11h. 51' 31", and, making correction for the error and rate, this amounted to 11h. 58' 6", so that the whole error, from the first setting sail, was only 1' 53", which, in the latitude of Portsmouth, would not amount to an error, in distance, of twenty miles.

When Mr Robison undertook the voyage to Jamaica, he made no stipulation for any remuneration; and Lord Anson assured him, that he should have no reason to repent the confidence which he placed in the Board. But when, on his return, he came to look for the reward, to which the success and trouble of the undertaking certainly entitled him, he soon found that he had greatly erred in leaving himself so much at the mercy of unforeseen contingencies. Lord Anson was ill of the disease of which he died, and was not in a condition to attend to business. Admiral Knowles was disgusted with the Admiralty, and with the Ministry, by

which he thought himself ill-used; so that Mr Robison had nothing to look for from personal kindness, and could trust only to the justice and moderation of his claims. These were of little advantage to him; for such was the inattention of the Lords of the Admiralty, and the members of the Board of Longitude, that he could not obtain access to any of them, nor even receive from them any answer to his memorials.

The picture which his letters to his father present, at this time, is that of a mind suffering severely from unworthy treatment, where it was least suspected. Men in office do not reflect, while they are busy about the concerns of nations, how much evil may be done by their neglect to do justice to an individual. They may be extinguishing the fire of genius, thrusting down merit below the level it should rise to, or prematurely surrounding the mind of a young man with a fence of suspicion and distrust, worse than the evils which it proposes to avert. Like other kinds of injustice, this may, however, meet with its punishment; though the victim of unmerited neglect may remain for ever obscure, and his sufferings for ever unknown, he may also emerge from obscurity, and the treatment he has met with may meet the eye of the public. It is probable that the member of these Boards most conspicuous for rank or for science, would not have been above some feeling of regret, if he

had learnt, that the young man, whose petitions he disregarded, was to become the ornament of his country, and the ill treatment he then met with, a material fact in the history of his life.

But though we must condemn the neglect of which Mr Robison had so much reason to complain, we do by no means regret that the recompense, which he or his friends had in view, was not actually conferred on him. This was no other than an appointment to the place of a purser in a ship of war; a sort of preferment which, to a man of the genius, information, and accomplishment of Mr Robison, must have turned out rather as a punishment than a reward. It was, however, the object which, by the advice of Sir Charles Knowles, he now aspired to; and, indeed, he had done so ever after his first voyage in the Royal William; for appears that he had wished to be made purser to the Peregrine at the time when Lieutenant Knowles was appointed to the command of that ship, though, considering its smallness, the situation could have been attended with little emolument. *

it

* It is, however, true, that the place of Purser was afterwards offered to Mr Robison, but such a one as he could have no temptation to accept. In 1763, when Lord Sandwich was First Lord of the Admiralty, his solicitations were so far listened to, that he was appointed to the Aurora, of 40 guns, then on the stocks. As the ship must be long of being in

Thus disappointed in his hopes, Mr Robison resolved on returning to Glasgow, in order to qualify himself for entering into the Church. Indeed, the idea of prosecuting his original destination seems often to have occurred to him, even when his views appeared to have a very different direction. When he left the Royal William in 1761, he was not without serious intentions of resuming the study of theology. This appears, both from a letter he wrote to his father, about that time, and from one which he himself received from young Knowles, who rallies him on his new profession, and on the singularity of having acquired a taste for theological studies in the ward room of a man of war.

When

he undertook the voyage to Jamaica, he would have wished to have had the patronage of his employers, for obtaining some ecclesiastical preferment rather than naval; and only agreed to the latter, as it lay more in the way of the Board of Longitude to help one to promotion in the navy than in the church. It appears, that he had never ceased te express to Dr Blair a desire of assuming the clerical character; and he actually had, from that gentleman, the offer of a curacy in a living of his own, to which, however, the emolument annexed was so small, that, after

commission, and the pay of the purser, in the mean time, very inconsiderable, Mr Robison declined accepting this appointment.

consultation with his father, he declined accepting of it.

But, however Mr Robison's views may have varied, to one object he steadily adhered, viz. the cultivation of science, and the acquisition of whatever knowledge the situations he was placed in brought within his reach.

He returned, therefore, to Glasgow; and a man, whose object was the prosecution of science, could not arrive at any place in a more auspicious moment, as that city was about to give birth to two of the greatest improvements, which, in the eighteenth century, have distinguished the progress either of the sciences or the arts. The one of these was the discovery of Latent Heat, by the late Dr Flack; the other was the invention of what may be properly called a New Steam-engine, by Mr Watt. The former of these eminent men was then the Lecturer on Chemistry in the University, and had just been led, by a train of most ingeniously contrived experiments, to the knowledge of a principle which seemed to promise better for an explanation of the process which takes place when heat is communicated to bodies, than any thing yet known in chemistry, viz. that when water passes from a solid to a fluid state, as much of its heat disappears as would have raised its temperature, had it remained solid, 140 degrees higher than that which it actually posMr Robison was already known to Dr

sesses.